Denzel Clarke isn’t one of the highest-profile prospects in the Oakland Athletics organization. A 2021 fourth-round pick out of Cal State Northridge, the 22-year-old outfielder is No. 17 in our most recent ranking of the system. But he is one of the most intriguing — and most exciting. Gifted with elite athleticism, Clarke made a number of highlight-reel catches this summer, and he also legged out a pair of inside-the-park home runs. In a season split between Low-A Stockton and High-A Lansing, he put up a 123 wRC+ while going deep 15 times and stealing 30 bases in 33 attempts.

His baseball background is modest compared to that of most of his peers. A native of Ontario, Canada, Clarke began playing at age 10, and it wasn’t until he was 16 that he began taking the game seriously. It was then that his travel-ball coach with the Toronto Mets told him he had a shot at doing something special if he devoted his attention to the diamond. Prior to that, he was multi-sport to the max.

“I played everything,” explained Clarke, who is currently with the Arizona Fall League’s Mesa Solar Sox. “In school, it was track and field — that runs in the family (Clarke’s mother competed in the 1984 Summer Olympics) —volleyball, basketball, badminton. I love racquet sports, so I played some tennis. I touched on pretty much everything except football and hockey. My mom was very precautionary with concussions, so those are the two I avoided.” Read the rest of this entry »

The field of hitters in the World Series is loaded. Both sides feature old and new stars who can tear the cover off the baseball. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Bryce Harper has been the most productive of all of them, with a .514 wOBA to this point. You have to go all the way down to the low .400s to find the next players on that list, but if you do, you see Jeremy Peña (.427 wOBA) and Alex Bregman (.407 wOBA). Peña has had the best stretch of his short career in these playoffs, delivering two-strike hit after two-strike hit. But the Astros third baseman, who has been penciled in right behind Peña and Yordan Alvarez, has also been fantastic.

There’s a reason Bregman is sitting fourth in the lineup behind three stars. His knack for not chasing breaking balls and getting to high velocity makes him an ideal hitter to follow Peña and Alvarez. Peña’s weakness is chasing sliders off the plate, while teams have consistently challenged Alvarez with high heat. But that approach has to change when facing Bregman, making it tough for any reliever to get through this stretch of the lineup unscathed. Interestingly, while Bregman’s chase rate hadn’t faltered at all, his ability to get to high velocity has only come around in the last month after a rough regular season, when Bregman posted a .242 wOBA against pitches thrown 96 mph or higher. To be honest, that surprised me. I know he doesn’t have crazy bat speed or hit the ball harder than most, but to the naked eye, he has one of the quickest triggers in the game.

When I say trigger, I’m referring to the time it takes Bregman to start his downswing and get to impact. If we were able to get our hands on his bat sensor data, I’d be very willing to bet this is where Bregman stands out amongst his peers. That skill makes him a great candidate to routinely beat high velocity. That’s a subjective thing to say without concrete data, but perhaps I can provide some video evidence. Let’s look to Game 3 of the ALCS:

Before this fastball, Bregman saw five upper-90s four-seamers from Gerrit Cole. If a very good hitter sees the same pitch six times in a row, I don’t doubt they’ll be able to make an adjustment like Bregman did here, even against Cole’s plus fastball. He had fouled off two heaters in this at-bat, and looked slightly late. Those swings, likely combined with the knowledge that Bregman had struggled with high velocity this year, was enough for Cole to stick to his guns and continue with the high heat. Unfortunately for him, Bregman adjusted by choking up and shortening his swing even further as he drilled this 100 mph fastball on the black right back up the middle at 105.7 mph.

By this time, Bregman had already laced a few liners off triple-digit fastballs. He had a hit in all three of his appearances against Andrés Muñoz in the ALDS, with the hits against fastballs coming in Games 2 and 3. Here they are:

Two fastballs over 101 mph, both of which were barreled over 105 mph to give Bregman a single and double, respectively. Both came on 0-0 counts, so I’m inclined to think Bregman was sitting on this pitch. He took Muñoz yard in Game 1 on a hanging slider, so he probably anticipated that the Mariners reliever wouldn’t go back to the pitch. Of course, even when you sit on a 101 mph fastball, you still have to barrel it. That’s a tough task for any hitter and Bregman made it look quite easy.

And it’s not as if Bregman was cheating his load or leg kick for those pitches against Cole and Muñoz. It looks natural for him to get his bat on plane and in the hitting zone very quickly. Given that, you might ask why Bregman was so bad against high velocity this year. As I said before, he had a .242 wOBA against these pitches, and it’s not like his .298 xwOBA was much better. Of the 23 home runs he hit in 2022, not a single one came on a fastball thrown 96 mph or higher. His swing type should enable him to hit these pitches well, but sometimes the eye test doesn’t align with a hitter’s outcomes. Still, by the looks of it, his performance in 2022 may have just been a blip. The following table shows Bregman’s performance against fastballs 96 mph and higher throughout his career:

The gap between his wOBA and xwOBA can probably be explained by a combination of bad BABIP luck and spray angle, but nonetheless, a career .363 xwOBA on this group of pitches is impressive. Focusing on just launch angle and exit velocity might miss out on some context, but it’s still a good representation of Bregman’s ability to hit these pitches hard in the air. If you exclude 2022 from the totals, Bregman’s wOBA/xwOBA split is .356/.385. Now, excluding 2022 isn’t exactly fair; this season did indeed happen! But I wanted to show you what Bregman had done before his struggles this year.

Even relative to the rest of the league, Bregman was a great hitter against high velocity. His .363 xwOBA against the pitch group since 2017 ranks him 26th in the league among hitters who have seen at least 750 of these fastballs. This was a proven skill that suddenly fell off hard in 2022 despite it being Bregman’s healthiest season in terms of games played since 2019. Sometimes a hitter’s mechanics get out of whack, and they just suddenly can’t handle a pitch they never had an issue with before. When that happens, it makes sense for high velocity to be the first thing a pitcher goes to. After all, fast things are hard to hit! After churning through swings from various months, I realized Bregman’s stride was slightly more open than it was in the playoffs. Here are two representative swings on inner-third pitches. The first is from June and the second is from September:

Unfortunately for Bregman, even such a small difference in stride direction made a huge difference in his batted ball quality. If you re-watch the swings from the playoffs, you can see Bregman staying near neutral to slightly closed. In the two swings above, Bregman’s stride leads to his front hip leaking out early. As a result, he flared a fly ball and chopped a groundball. The front foot rotation tells you where his direction is heading in both pitches. He is losing his center of balance while trying to throw his hands at the high velocity. His swing is so short that he is still able to get to it, but the slight mechanical difference distorts his bat path enough to ruin his contact quality. Now that we know this, we can better understand why Bregman has been so fantastic in the postseason from a mechanical perspective, but do the batted ball statistics match? Yes, they do indeed.

His .518/.468 wOBA/xwOBA split gives us additional context to the quality of contact Bregman made. There is a gap between the two, but it doesn’t really matter in this case. A .468 xwOBA is still a very, very high mark. He is on the short list of hitters who seem especially well equipped to deal with the high velocity playoff pitchers bring to the mound. The swings I showed you against Cole and Muñoz are good examples of that, but I’d like to take you through an at-bat from Game 4 of the World Series when Bregman faced José Alvarado. Bregman looked overmatched to start, but he eventually came out on top even though he was down 0-2 in the count. The bases were loaded with no outs. Alvarado came in to limit the damage. Here’s how it started:

On the 0-0 count, Bregman took this 101 mph sinker, which ran back over the front door. Coming from Alvarado’s arm slot, this pitch is a doozy. Good decision to take. Down 0-1, he had to be aggressive to try and drive a runner in:

Bregman was definitely swinging for a 101 mph sinker again. He didn’t recognize the spin, and the pitch broke under his barrel. He checked in with the umpire to see if the pitch was in the zone to reinforce his understanding of where it ends up after it breaks. Heading into the 0-2 count, Bregman had to cover the diving cutter and the turbo sinker:

This pitch was slightly higher than the previous one and allowed Bregman to get a little more of barrel on it. Realistically, you can’t cover every zone against Alvarado with the sweet spot of your barrel, as he has two pitches that break in opposite directions. This is the very best you can do if you’re simultaneously trying to beat 101. By the looks of it, Bregman had no problem doing so in the next pitch:

That pitch was meant to run over the front door like the first one, but Alvarado committed the biggest sin when it comes to front-door sinkers: He let it run over the middle of the plate and right into Bregman’s ideal bat path up and away. Bregman was doing his best to cover the high velocity while down in the count, and he did. In Game 1 of the series, he had a very uncomfortable at-bat against Alvarado and wasn’t able to cover the sinker or cutter. He knew he had to make a slight tweak to get a different result. Swings like this are why he leads all players in the postseason in hits (six) and wOBA (.518) against heaters 96 mph and above.

Don’t get me wrong, a .518 wOBA against the best fastballs isn’t sustainable. Not even Aaron Judge posted a wOBA like that while hitting every fastball to the moon this season. However, the combination of Bregman’s swing and career-long skill of hitting high velocity makes him significantly more capable of producing hot streaks like this one than the vast majority of players in the league. Here I’ll remind you that over the course of a season or a career, a player doesn’t perform to their average mark the entire way. There are hot and cold streaks wrapped in there that bring them to their true average. Bregman is having one of those hot streaks, and it couldn’t come at a better time.

As his team takes a crucial 3-2 lead heading back to Houston, don’t be surprised if Zack Wheeler and the rest of the Phillies’ pitching staff avoid heaters against Bregman. The Phillies have no room for error, which means they must avoid Astros hitters’ strengths. Right now, Bregman’s swing mechanics are locked in to beat these pitches and the Crawford Boxes are lurking in left field, just waiting for him to yank one out like he did against Luis Severino in the ALCS.

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley review all of the action from the historic, eventful fourth and fifth games of the World Series, banter about a fan heckling Rob Manfred, and share multiple Past Blasts (33:22) from 1925 (plus a throwback, Philly-centric Past Blast from 1868). Then (50:08) they talk to Baseball Prospectus writer Michael Ajeto about Astros starter Cristian Javier’s unicorn fastball, the value of vertical approach angle, and the state of pitching analysis, plus a postscript.

Audio intro: The Cribs, “Different Angle”
Audio interstitial: Dawes, “From the Right Angle”
Audio outro: Ringo Starr, “Vertical Man”

Link to Baumann on Game 4
Link to Baumann on Game 5
Link to Ben Clemens on Peña
Link to xBA figures from Game 4
Link to Walsh misplay
Link to Hoskins misplay
Link to Mancini play
Link to McCormick play
Link to Manfred letter
Link to Manfred Reddit thread
Link to Manfred heckling video
Link to 1925 story source
Link to Ban Johnson SABR bio
Link to SABR on O’Connell and Dolan
Link to Jacob Pomrenke’s website
Link to Jacob Pomrenke on Twitter
Link to 1868 story source
Link to @OldBaseballNews on Coolidge
Link to Coolidge article source
Link to collected “boner” articles
Link to “boner” etymology
Link to Michael on Javier
Link to Passan on Javier
Link to Michael on Gallen
Link to Matt Lentzner on pitch angle
Link to Ethan Moore on VAA
Link to Alex Chamberlain on VAA
Link to Chamberlain on VAA again
Link to VAA primer on YouTube
Link to Ben Clemens on the Giants
Link to Robert Orr on the Giants
Link to Bregman on hitting spin
Link to Jackalopes name change
Link to Ben on pitcher deception
Link to Michael’s podcast

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As FanGraphs’ own Jay Jaffe noted last week in his piece on the dominance of relief pitching this postseason, the average time to play nine innings is down by 15 minutes in the playoffs after dropping by an average of seven minutes in the regular season. As Jay wrote, there are a handful of factors likely contributing to shorter game times in 2022, ranging from reliever usage and rule changes such as the three batter minimum, to technological adjustments like PitchCom, to changes in gameplay and dwindling offensive production. Regardless of the reason, it’s a shift that warrants exploration. League leadership has spent the better part of the last decade focused on reducing the length of its games; the commissioner talked about improving baseball’s pace of play on his very first day of the job. While games are still longer than three hours on average this season, the seven-minute dip after a record-long average game in 2021 marks the most precipitous single-year drop in the Divisional Era, and that sounds like it should be music to the ears of Rob Manfred and Co.

But the league’s objective with respect to time of game is more nuanced than just shaving off minutes at any expense. Yes, Major League Baseball is interested in games moving faster, which has led to rule changes like the upcoming pitch clock in 2023 and the existing three batter minimum for relievers. Teams used 3.30 relievers per game in the regular season in 2022, down from 3.43 in ’21, and fewer pitching changes mean less wasted time. But it is also interested in maintaining some level of offensive action – hence the introduction of the designated hitter in the National League this year, and bans on the shift set to come along with the pitch clock next year. Some improvements in time of game can come at the expense of offensive action, and vice versa, and titrating the levels of each that make for the best product is a delicate balance. In 2022, we did see offense trend down to concerning levels, but with a closer look, there is also some reason for optimism with regards to finding this balance. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Nola had a rotten first start of the World Series. He gave up five runs before he finished three innings, and while the Phillies bailed him out en route to a 6–5 win, that game surely left him with a bad taste in his mouth. When he took the ball again for Game 4, he was likely hoping to change the story once and for all.

He had a plan, too. In Game 1, Nola had gotten beaten in a silly way. He came out pumping fastballs, and the Astros were only too happy to feast. They collected six hits; five, including a three-run home run by Kyle Tucker, came on fastballs. Time after time, he threw a perfectly serviceable fastball up there, and the Astros pounced on it. Some were blooped. Some were smashed. Nearly none were missed; the Astros swung at 16 fastballs and came up empty exactly once.

That’s hardly surprising. The Astros were one of the best teams at hitting fastballs this year. They were the best, period, on fastballs below 95 mph. Even with playoff adrenaline, that’s where Nola lives. It’s a bad recipe against such a fearsome offensive team; if you can’t make the Astros swing and miss, you’re going to have a long night — or a short night, measured in innings.

In Game 4, Houston came out swinging yet again. Nola threw nine fastballs in the first inning, and the Astros swung at six. They missed exactly one: the first pitch of the game to Jose Altuve. Nola started Tucker with two straight fastballs in the second inning, and he was on them both times. Something had to change. Read the rest of this entry »

2:01

Jay Jaffe: Good afternoon, folks! And welcome to my first chat of November. That was one hell of a game last night. I wrote about Nick Castellanos’ ongoing struggles at the plate, something I had planned to do even before he wound up in the position to be the hero or make the final out. https://blogs.fangraphs.com/inevitably-game-5-found-the-slumping-nick-…

2:02	Jay Jaffe: (Elsewhere on the site, Davy Andrews has a look at Castellanos’ defense https://blogs.fangraphs.com/nick-castellanos-outshines-the-gold-glover…)

2:03	Jay Jaffe: Yesterday I had a look at the ongoing outsized impact of home runs in the constricted offensive environment we see in October/November https://blogs.fangraphs.com/no-hitters-are-great-but-the-long-ball-sti…

2:03	Jay Jaffe: and now, on with the show…

2:06

Jay Jaffe: Well, a lot would depend upon what the Yankees do to fill the void left by Judge’s absence, because it’s not like they’d go into the season without some other big bat or upgrades. But in terms of which team’s roster as it would stand looks the strongest  if they don’t retain their free agents, I suspect it might be the Blue Jays

Read the rest of this entry »

In a Game 5 that was an instant classic, Nick Castellanos‘ number came up. With the Phillies losing 3–2 and down to their final out, Ryan Pressly hit Bryce Harper on the right foot with a slider, putting the tying run aboard and bringing up Castellanos, 0-for-3 with a walk for the night and just about the weakest link in the Phillies’ lineup during their amazing October run. Castellanos fell behind 0–2, chasing a low slider and then fouling off a juicy center-cut one, but he laid off three low-and-away pitches to draw the count full. Pressly then threw a hanging slider, but Castellanos could only hit a grounder to shortstop Jeremy Peña, a routine play that produced an anticlimactic ending to an absolute nailbiter that swung the series to three games to two in favor of the Astros.

It was the latest rough night in a postseason run that’s had its share of them for the 30-year-old slugger. Castellanos is 3-for-20 with a walk and eight strikeouts in the World Series, and while he has company there (both Rhys Hoskins and J.T. Realmuto are 3-for-21, albeit with homers), his .197/.246/.262 line through 65 postseason plate appearances gives him the lowest wRC+ (43) of any Phillies regular, though Bryson Stott (45 wRC+, via a .140/.260/.233 line) has the slightly lower OPS, .493 to .508. Castellanos has had a few big moments at the plate and has made some surprisingly stellar defensive plays, but he’s one or two games away from the end of a frustrating season in which he batted just .263/.305/.389 (94 wRC+) with 13 homers in the first year of a five-year, $100 million deal he signed in March. Read the rest of this entry »

If you’ve been watching the playoffs, you’ve likely heard at least one broadcaster call Houston right fielder Kyle Tucker underrated. In Game 1 of the World Series, Tucker did his best to remedy the situation, blasting home runs in his first two at-bats. On Monday, MLB announced that after two years as a Gold Glove finalist, Tucker had finally won the award. Still, he’s not the right fielder everyone’s talking about:

Nick Castellanos stole Tucker’s thunder not once but twice, saving Game 1 with a sliding catch, and making a nearly identical play on the first pitch of Game 3. As if that wasn’t enough, the World Series’ third-most talked about play in right field didn’t belong to Tucker either:

Read the rest of this entry »

PHILADELPHIA — In the aftermath of Houston’s Game 4 win over the Phillies, as reporters started to file into the visiting clubhouse and mill around the lockers of the three relievers who’d closed out the game, Justin Verlander was pulling on his shoes and heading for the exit. When someone asked him to stop for a chat, he politely declined, saying he needed to get to bed early before his start in Game 5.

What followed probably wasn’t the biggest game of Verlander’s life; he’s started clinchers and elimination games, and win or lose on Thursday, the Astros were going to head back home with plenty of reason for optimism. But at 39 years old, in possibly his last game for the team that he’s taken to the deepest reaches of the playoffs every year since his arrival in 2017, this might have been his last chance to win a World Series game.

Verlander’s ineffectiveness in the World Series has been one of baseball’s great mysteries for 16 years. Despite innumerable accomplishments and accolades not only in the regular season but also in the ALDS and ALCS, he entered Game 5 with a career World Series record of 0–6 and a 6.07 ERA in eight starts, the worst record in MLB history.

That ended on Thursday in Philadelphia. Verlander evaded, inveigled, and scattered just enough to stay out of big trouble. He allowed just one run over five eventful innings, which was just enough to scratch the zero off the front of his Fall Classic record and move the Astros, with a 3–2 win, to within a game of their second World Series title. Read the rest of this entry »

Episode 999

This week on the pod, the most Philadelphia pairing we have on staff comes together to break down the World Series so far.

Michael Baumann is fresh off covering Games 3 and 4 of the World Series in person, and he welcomes lead prospect analyst and old Crashburn Alley pal Eric Longenhagen to discuss what it was like to see the Phillies get no-hit on the largest stage. The pair have mostly grown out of their fandom as they have matured into sports professionals, but they share how the fan feeling has crept back in a little bit this October. We also hear about rooting for Corinne Landrey to be the first FanGraphs alum to win a championship ring, rooting for your own prospect evaluations to come true, the difference in attitude between the Houston and Philadelphia clubhouses, and a digression about high school drum major camp.

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Audio after the jump. (Approximate 50 minute play time.)

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